SEGA: Practitioners of Irony

[shadowgoten]

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/12/12/new-sega-tool-automates-3d-lip-syncing/

Nothing takes away from a good, in-game voice acting performance than lip-syncing that looks like it came from a badly dubbed kung fu movie. But what developer wants to go through the painstaking process of modeling every minute mouth movement? That's where Sega comes in, with a new software tool that analyzes a voice sample and automatically matches a characters facial movements to the spoken words. The tool can even reportedly detect "happiness, anger, surprise and sadness" in the voice and change the character's facial expression accordingly.

Of course, Sega's lip-syncing solution isn't the only one out there, but this new tool reportedly "increased efficiency nearly 100-fold" in internal tests. That leaves plenty of time for more important things, like selling your body on the street to pay the tool's 207,900 yen ($1,862) asking price. That might be chump change for the big guys, but bedroom programmers should work on their come hither smile.

I've never been impressed with Sega and their lip syncing efforts before this (Sonic Adventure anyone??), maybe this will change everyone's thoughts?

[Aaron C-T]

Sounds interesting. Good to see them working on this sort of thing. Hopefully they'll not only employ it themselves to make their games look better, but other companies will purchase and use it as well.

[Spike]

That's awesome to the max, dewds.

I seriously think someone needs to make this kind of thing for Flash. Lip syncing is one of the reasons I quit that program, especially for cartoons with a lot of dialogue.

[ila]

motion portrait did it first.

[Eraysor]

Good luck beating the Source engine.